On November 6-8, 2012, the 4th international conference of Aliento will be held in Nancy (MSH Lorraine) and Paris (INALCO):
Énoncés sapientiels brefs, traductions, traducteurs et contextes culturels et historiques.
On that occasion, Ute Pietruschka and Monica Berti will present an attempt to study the possible Greek origin of the so-called “Laments” of the philosophers at the tomb of Alexander the Great.
The Syriac text of the laments is preserved in a manuscript (Mingana syr. 47 – fol. 267a-b) copied in 1907 in Alqōš and has been edited by Sebastian Brock (‘Notes on Some Texts in the Mingana Collection’, JSS 14 (1969), p. 216 and ‘The Laments of the Philosophers over Alexander in Syriac’, JSS 15 (1970), pp. 205-218).
The names of the “philosophers” who pronounced the laments go back to the Greek tradition (Aristotle, Theon, Philotas, Demetrios and possibly Polemon) and the syntactic structure of the Syriac text reveals a “mirror translation” of the language of the original, which was possibly Greek.
This presentation is part of a project that aims at exploring text re-uses across languages and times, combining both traditional and modern tools as the Alpheios Translation Alignment Editor and the Alpheios Treebank Editor.
